#it wasnt complete until the screenshot was in the quirk too | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shoutscion · 7 years

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alright i was gonna save this to be a big surprise but this story’s too good to pass up

buckle up yall this one’s a long one

so right now i’m working on something i call a Slow Sequence, which is just the parts of jack and casie that arent just jack and casie lost in the woods. they’re top down more traditional rpg segments where you can manage your inventory, relax, and engage in some good old wholesome messing-with-casieisms

here’s an early look:

i’ve been working on this for the past week now and i’ve basically got them ready to go, ready to replace the existing shop sequences with an entirely new screen that allows you to do a little exploration and conversation before you get back out into the world and into Fast Sequences (the normal game). this morning in particular i was working in over drive. probably because i’ve been working my ass off on commissions and i might be in a like, productivity frenzy

i managed to crank out a new tileset i liked, some new dialogue, developed a vision for Casie’s Outpost (it’s probably not actually called that, but it’s the outpost that casie lives at, so let’s call it that for now) (it’s either that or “outpost 22″ which just doesnt make any sense yet so like lesser of two evils here) in a couple hours

and then i ran out of memory.

gm8.1 has a very particular quirk that i like that makes it really good at rapid prototyping and it’s that it saves all of the shit you do to ram instead of the hard drive. this means that you can start a game really fast without having to wait for an entire new save cycle and recompilation which makes it really good for brute forcing code, which is basically the breadth of my programming playbook. hit it over and over until it works. unfortunately, hitting things over and over will eventually (read: after 4+ hours of work with very large files) swamp gm’s alotted memory, and cause gm to lock up. but running out of memory is a hunter not unbeknownst to its prey. i have a contingency. my contingency is to save immediately, and have backups in case something goes wrong. which sometimes it does.

i would say it’s like a 90/10 chance

anyway, today this corrupted my file.

and corrupted my automatically generated backup save file.

because i accidentally hit the save button twice.

this was about an hour and a half ago. yes, the filename for this subproject was literally just called ‘fuck’. that was the word that was on my mind at the time. i dont think i was upset or anything i was just like ‘fuck’ but like, thats how i always am. the intention was to just import the project into gms and then merge it wholesale with the main jack and casie project, so the title of the 8.1 version mattered very little. you should see the rest of them. i have 4 files called temp0 through temp4 and some of them are just backups of the same file

anyway, if i had just failed to save or something (or just closed the window without trying to save) i would have lost 30 minutes worth of work. but because i took my shots, i lost weeks of work. like, the majority of the month of february. there’s supposed to be a demo out in march. march is in 7 days.

i went to bed and began to rethink my options. and also fall asleep, because i have been up for like 19 hours and i had just eaten and basically i was a mess of debuffs at that very second. fortunately, because i am a big fuckin showoff and enjoy rubbing my shit in people’s faces, i had a cache of shit lying around on discords and slacks and line chats i guess that i could just re-integrate back into my tileset proper but that would still leave me without the conversation engine which is stupidly robust and involved and took the majority of the time (the rest of the time was like, not even drawing the tileset: more like working out what the fuck non-enemy things would look like in jack and casie) i had spent on coding fuck.gm81. i had already done it once though so i had worked out the theory, so i just had to do it again. which i could do! it would just take all day.

there’s an exhibition tomorrow. and i was falling asleep. it was at this very second i realized that my mistake in accidentally pressing a finicky touch keyboard button twice had actually ruined pretty much everything, and decided to actually fall asleep in order to hide from my problems

so i laid there for like 45 minutes, ostensibly trying to go to sleep. not even really mad at this point or even like upset. more like that perfect trance like state of being simultaneously so infuriated but also so completely defeated that youre aware that raising a hand at all in protest is a waste of energy so instead you decide to just fuckin sit there, grimacing, trying to will a solution into existence

game maker studio has an import function that pulls information from a .gm81 file. it’s kind of finicky and kind of weird because it reads every asset one at a time and imports them one at a time so it’s kind of slow but you get to see a nice big bar that fills up as gms works its way through your file. it’s pretty satisfying. also, fuck.gm81 wasn’t an empty file. it was like 92kb or something. it wasnt corrupted in that it disintegrated or something and all the packets were destroyed, it was more like something was just being read wrong by gm8.1

i realized this all at once. i then realized i was screaming

importing it to gms worked

not perfectly, but well enough

i could fix a broken system in a heartbeat. or at least faster then i could build a new one.

the biggest problem is the obvious corruption. apparently, because i ran out of memory building backgrounds, the backgrounds are what got corrupted. in particular the main tileset that i had been working on for the past couple days had completely been replaced by just a sheer 255 255 255 black. but more importantly all the new art i had done for casie and company are OK, and my code is OK, and after a little digging i found a screenshot i had posted around of Casie’s Outpost in development

and now i just have to

rip my own

pixel art

but it beats doing it over again!

#game maker #gamedev #pixel art #agdg #video games #Jack and Casie

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